Bathroom Baseboards Finished
I finished installing the trim in the bathroom yesterday. I can't quite remember how long it took but there were a lot of stops and stats. I screwed up a couple things of course. I really needed to get the baseboards done before I put the bathroom together tho. And a bathroom is pretty important for living there. At least that's what the bank tells me.
Putting the plywood blocks into the brick with Tapcon screws worked really well. Much better than the fluted masonry nails. Those outside walls in the bathroom are brick walls with a layer of plaster, a layer of some kind of tile mastic for the old chair rail height tile, and then a layer of drywall I had hung over top of that. The drywall was real easy to cut a hole in just but using my drill and a thick drill bit on high speed to make a sideways cut like a drywall router. Then I attached some 3/8" plywood blocks with Tapcon screws and nailed the baseboard into that blocking. Worked like a charm.
I'm just using some pre-primed, finger joint 1x4's for the baseboards and 1x3's for the door casing. I got rid of the door casing that came from my prehung door because I hate the casing that comes with those. It looks so damn institutional. This trim is a little unconventional but hopefully it'll look okay and not like some idiot thought he could cut costs and use whatever wood he had lying around.
I had a really hard time with the outside corner of the chase that goes around the vent stack. I took me an hour just to cut those two tiny pieces. I don't have anything that'll measure that weird angle (of course it wasn't straight) and my miter saw won't cut more than a 45 degree angle anyway. So I had to shim underneath the pieces in strange ways to get it right. It took a lot of time and a lot of cuts. Hopefully the rest of my outside corners won't be as bad because I've got a bunch more to do for the rest of the upstairs.
The other thing I screwed up was I caulked underneath the baseboard with silicone before I painted it. I should have caulked after I painted because the silicone resists paint. So I spent a couple hours scraping the excess off with a razor blade. Ugh.
But now it's all painted and looks pretty good. I painted it the same blue as the walls. Vicki didn't like the idea of painting it anything other than white but I'm pretty bored of white trim. I think this looks a lot better.